Uncertain Chances
Science, Skepticism, and Belief in Nineteenth-Century American Literature
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Product details:
- Publisher OUP USA
- Date of Publication 19 January 2012
- ISBN 9780199797578
- Binding Hardback
- No. of pages256 pages
- Size 163x239x27 mm
- Weight 592 g
- Language English 0
Categories
Short description:
Maurice Lee's study illustrates how writers such as Poe, Melville, Douglass, Thoreau, Dickinson, and others participated in a broad intellectual and cultural shift in which Americans increasingly learned to live with the threatening and wonderful possibilities of chance.
MoreLong description:
The role of chance changed in the nineteenth century, and American literature changed with it. Long dismissed as a nominal concept, chance was increasingly treated as a natural force to be managed but never mastered. New theories of chance sparked religious and philosophical controversies while revolutionizing the sciences as probabilistic methods spread from mathematics, economics, and sociology to physics and evolutionary biology. Chance also became more visible in everyday life as Americans struggled to control its power through weather forecasting, insurance, game theory, statistics, military science, and financial strategy.
Uncertain Chances shows how the rise of chance shaped the way nineteenth-century American writers faced questions of doubt and belief. Poe in his detective fiction critiques probabilistic methods. Melville in Moby-Dick and beyond struggles to vindicate moral action under conditions of chance. Douglass and other African American authors fight against statistical racism. Thoreau learns to appreciate the play between nature's randomness and order. Dickinson works faithfully to render poetically the affective experience of chance-surprise. These and other nineteenth-century writers dramatize the inescapable dangers and wonderful possibilities of chance. Their writings even help to navigate extremes that remain with us today-fundamentalism and relativism, determinism and chaos, terrorism and risk-management, the rational confidence of the Enlightenment and the debilitating doubts of modernity.
An erudite...densely informative study.
Table of Contents:
Introduction
Chapter One
Probably Poe
Chapter Two
Moby-Dick and the Opposite of Providence
Chapter Three
Doubting If Doubt Itself Be Doubting: After Moby-Dick
Chapter Four
Douglass' Long Run
Chapter Five
Roughly Thoreau
Chapter Six
Dickinson's Precarious Steps, Surprising Leaps, and Bounds
Coda
Lost Causes and the Civil War
